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by ethbr0 2086 days ago
That's apples and oranges.

Counting published vulnerabilities in open source systems vs closed source systems says nothing about the relative true ratio of vulnerabilities.

1 comments

Are you seriously claiming that anything short of omniscience is useless? In most fields people deal with incomplete data on a daily basis and this is no different. CVEs don’t tell you everything but they definitely give you more than zero, and more to the point, the many vulnerabilities in open source projects suggests that the very broad but completely unsupported claim I was responding to is based on ideology rather than reasoned analysis.
> the many vulnerabilities in open source projects suggests that the very broad but completely unsupported claim I was responding to is based on ideology rather than reasoned analysis

Does it? In order to claim that, one would have to have some idea of (a) the ratio of disclosed vulnerabilities to true vulnerabilities discovered in both open source, accessible code vs closed source, hardware locked code, and (b) the relative ratios of disclosed vulnerabilities.

Do you have any idea what either ratio might be? 1:1? 4:1? 1:4? 100:1?

Again, the comment I responded to made an absolute claim but, like you, had no supporting evidence. Unless one of you can produce some evidence it’s hard to support the belief that this is based on data.

If you read the thread, note that I’m not taking a side other than finding it absurd to claim that all open source products are inherently better than all proprietary products with no analysis or data.

Unless you know the true ratio, you can't claim that open source projects are better either. Or that one has advantages over the other when it comes to cryptographic security.

I'm not GP and I'm not arguing for either side, just pointing i tout.